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Wednesday, December 21, 2011

Making Our Own Food

I wanted to learn how to make noodles like my Grandmother used to make for her prized Chicken Noodle Soup recipe, so my mom decided to share the recipe and process with me. While we were creating these noodles, I thought about all of the farmers who had a hand in getting the ingredients to our table.

The recipe started out with these guys. Eggs are produced in many states across the US, but the top three egg producing states are Iowa, Ohio and Pennsylvania. In 2009, US Farmers produced 246 eggs for each person living in the US. That's a lot of omelets!

We mixed the eggs with some flour. Flour is made from wheat which is a crop grown very readily in the state of Kansas. Over 240,000 family farms in the US grow wheat. About 2/3 of that wheat crop is grown on farms in the Mid West, the belt that stretches from Montana down to Texas. Of the wheat grown in the US, over 70% of it is used for human food products. Every year each American consumes around 136 pounds of wheat in different food products.

We mixed the eggs and flour together. I kneaded it until it was smooth and stretchy for the noodle roller. The noodle roller made the dough very very thin for cutting.

Here's a shot of my mom running the dough through the pasta roller to get it very thin.

And here we are cutting the noodles into the shape we wanted to do for our Chicken Noodle soup recipe.

We had to let the noodles dry on the rack before we were ready to store them or cook them. Mom told me that her mom had laid them out on tea towels on their beds to dry all day. We used the clothes drying rack to consolidate the space. They didn't need to dry very long at all.

Here is the final product! Our noodles were very delicous in the soup that we made. These noodles could be used in a lot of dishes, but they are very thin so you have to be careful how much you handle them once they are cooked. In the US, people consume 9 kg of pasta every year, which seems like a lot to me. Until you look at the 28 kg of pasta every year a person consumes in Italy.

If you'd like the recipe for the Chicken Noodle Soup or the noodles my mom and I made, just share a comment and I'd be happy to share this family recipe with you. Enjoy!

Best,

Tera

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All facts and figures from this post were taken from the USDA website.

2 comments:

It was delicious! Enjoy trying out making your own food and getting a better look at what goes into putting dinner on the table. It gave me more of an appreciation for Agriculture, hope it does the same for you.

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